CRITICAL NOTES
Luke 14:25. There went with Him.—I.e., journeyed with Him; many, if not most, of them being on their way to one of the feasts in Jerusalem. The multitudes were attracted by Christ’s teaching and works, and He wished to teach His followers the wide difference between an outward and a real adhesion to Him. He spoke these stern words to sift the multitude. The purpose of self-sacrifice by which He was inspired lent force to His utterances. “The nearer the approach of His own self-sacrifice, the more distinct and the more ideal are the claims which He makes” (Meyer).
Luke 14:26. Cometh unto Me.—This is descriptive of outward adhesion. Hate not.—The word cannot be understood of active hatred, since Christ commands us to love even our enemies, but denotes a deep and heartfelt alienation from all ties, and affections, and feelings, that would interfere with devotion to Christ. The clue to whatever difficulty the words might, at first sight, suggest is to be found in the phrase “and his own life also.” Life here means animal life; not life in the highest sense. In the same manner in which a man is called to control and repress and subordinate his lower life to higher claims, at any cost of feeling, is he to deal with the other relationships in which he finds himself. “Let the hate begin here, and little explanation will be further wanted. It need hardly be observed that this hate is not only consistent with, but absolutely necessary for, the very highest kind of love. It is that element in love which makes a man a wise and Christian friend, not for time only, but for eternity” (Alford).
Luke 14:27. Bear his cross.—I.e., submit to any sufferings, however severe, to which his devotion to Christ might expose him.
Luke 14:28. Sitteth not down.—Deliberate and careful consideration (so in Luke 14:31) of ability to complete the undertaking.
Luke 14:31. Or what king …?—The former illustration lays stress upon the folly, this upon the danger, of following Christ without having duly considered what is involved in discipleship—what self-renunciation must be exemplified. The purpose of the illustrations seems to be to enforce the necessity of earnestness and deliberation in entering upon and discharging the obligations of the spiritual life.
Luke 14:33. That forsaketh not, etc.—In other words, “counting the cost” (Luke 14:28), which may be that of forsaking the interests, and affections, and possessions, of this present life.
Luke 14:34. If the salt have lost, etc.—The life of the merely nominal Christian is compared to salt that has lost its characteristic properties and is useless for any purpose. The office of the follower of Jesus is to be a salutary influence in the world, by which it is to be preserved from corruption. The figure was evidently one frequently used by Christ (cf. Matthew 5:13; Mark 9:50). The loss of savour is an illustration drawn from actual fact. “It is a well-known fact that the salt of this country (gathered from the marshes in dry weather), when in contact with the ground, or exposed to air or sun, does become insipid and useless” (Thomson: “The Land and the Book”).
Luke 14:35. Neither fit, etc.—Of no use as manure, or to be mixed with manure. Men cast it out.—A fit emblem of the contempt which even the worldly-minded have for any who fall away from Christian practice—who have the name of disciples, but have lost all that differentiates them from the children of this world. He that hath ears, etc.—Words that no doubt closed the discourse (cf. chap. Luke 8:8).
MAIN HOMILETICS OF THE PARAGRAPH.— Luke 14:25-35
Thorough-going Disciples.—Complete surrender of earthly things as the indispensable condition of discipleship is the teaching of this passage. Crowds followed Christ, but He will have no recruits enlisted on false pretences, and rather discourages than stimulates inconsiderate adhesion. The clear presentation of difficulties stifles no genuine earnestness, but rather fans the flame. Christ would have the light-minded crowds, following Him with curiosity, understand that it is no holiday stroll nor triumphal march in which they are joining, but a procession to a cross. So, if they are not ready for that, they had better not come after Him, and, at any rate, must come with their eyes open, if at all.
I. Our Lord lays down the law of discipleship.—There is a twofold requirement, the solemnity of the statement of which is increased by that repeated “He cannot be My disciple.”
1. The first requirement refers to the heart. Jesus claims the subordination, and, if necessary, the sacrifice of all other love to the supreme love to Himself, as the prime, indispensable condition of all discipleship. We need not wonder at that strong word “hate.” The “hate” which embraces all whom nature and God bid us love, and our own lives also, cannot be the earthly passionate loathing, attended by desire to harm, which goes by that name, but detachment of heart consequent upon supreme attachment of heart to Jesus—the purifying of earthly love by loving only in Him, rigid subordination of the closest ties, and the readiness to sacrifice the tenderest of these when they come in the way of our higher love to Christ. Mark the tremendous claim which Christ here makes, in assuming His right to the throne in all our hearts. What gives Him the right, and how can He satisfy the love which He demands? Surely He who thus speaks must be conscious of Divinity, or His claim is blasphemous. Surely He not only is, but does, what deserves and draws, and will bless with full fruition the fullest love of every heart.
2. The second requirement applies to conduct. The first calls for the surrender of the dearest; the second, for the acceptance of the most painful. There is here a veiled allusion to Christ’s own cross, as if He had said, “I, on this journey in which you are following Me so blindly and eagerly, am going to My cross. If you could see, it is already lying on My shoulder. If you follow Me, you, too, will have to carry a cross.” Note the two halves of conduct which together make up real discipleship—taking up each the cross which is his own, and imitating Christ. Every true Christian has his own special burden of humiliation, difficulty, self-denial, to carry. The cross is heavy, and hard to carry; but unless we do carry it, we are not His. And all the procession of cross-bearers go after the Lord. If we follow after Him, our crosses grow light, remembering His, and with Him for leader and companion.
II. Two illustrative similes enforce the law.—
1. The rash builder. This sets forth discipleship in its aspect of building up the noble and conspicuous structure of a Christ-like character. That is the life-long work of a true disciple. Life is not for enjoyment, nor for worldly ends, but for building up a holy character, and all outward things are but scaffolding to further the building. Expenditure is needed to secure this end. Building costs money. The building of ourselves takes and tasks all the resources of a life-time. In other words, we are not disciples unless we surrender self and all we have. It plainly follows that there must be deliberate, open-eyed recognition of what being a Christian involves, at the beginning, if there is not to be failure long before the end. But if we find that we have not the power to build, are we to give up the attempt? No. For they who know that they can do nothing of themselves are they who will most humbly look for, and most certainly receive, the grace that will keep them steadfast and growing; and they who fail are precisely those who begin with swaggering self-sufficiency. The bystanders mock, as they have a right to do. Thorough-going Christians may be disliked, but they are respected. Earnestness awes and sometimes excites hostility, but inconsistency only amuses.
2. The rash soldier. This presents Christian life as a warfare. There is not only need for continuous effort, as in building, but for continual struggle with an enemy stronger than ourselves. Our Lord here warns men not to begin the conflict unless they are prepared to fight it out to the death. Does He, then, advise a man who feels himself too weak to conquer evil to give up the struggle and to become its tributary slave? That would be a counsel of despair. If we find that we have not enough force to meet the enemy, the recognition of our weakness, and the abandonment of all trust in self, will bring an ally into the field whose reinforcements will make us more than conquerors.
III. The final warning.—Entire self-surrender is necessary in order to our realising the ideal of the Christian life in our own characters. It is also necessary in order to the discharge of the Christian’s office to society. The true disciple, who has forsaken all, and taken up his cross and gone after Christ, is the salt. The action of such souls on the community is to arrest corruption, and by diffusing a penetrating and sometimes biting, but always purifying, influence to sweeten and hallow what is on the road to putridity. There is need, however, for watchful renewal, day by day, of the self-surrender; for the saltest salt may lose its savour. It is a slow and often unconscious process. The salt keeps shape, colour, bulk—only the invisible savour is gone; but everything worth keeping goes with it. How can the loss be repaired? There is nothing in the world that can re-salt it. Of course, our Lord does not here close the door to the possibility of going again to Him, and getting from Him a fresh gift, even of the grace which we have so carelessly spilt; but what He means is, that since disciples are to give, and not get, savour, there are none to give it them if they lose it. He is always there to give, but that is not the point in hand. Christians who are not acting as salt are doing no good at all. Saltless salt is utterly useless, and by no means ornamental. The only thing to do with it is to cart it away. It may do to lay on a path, but that is all it is good for. Stern words from gentle lips! But they are true, and need to be laid to heart by the professing Christians of this as of every time.—Maclaren.
SUGGESTIVE COMMENTS ON Luke 14:25-35
Luke 14:25. “Great multitudes.”—Christ reads their hearts and foresees the future; He knows that multitudes will fall away from Him, and multitudes cry “Crucify Him” (chap. Luke 23:21). And so He winnows them by prophecies of tribulation and trial; as Gideon winnowed his thirty-two thousand until he had brought them down to three hundred (Judges 7:1-8).
The Fickle Crowd.—Christ placed no confidence in the multitude loosely attached to Him; He knew that a day of temptation would scatter them. “They that are with Him are called and chosen and faithful” (Revelation 17:14), and such, and such only, will abide with Him to the end.
Luke 14:26-27. “If any man come … and hate not.”—Discipleship may involve
(1) the sacrifice of affections—the breaking of earthly ties, and
(2) the endurance of persecution.
Luke 14:26. “Come to Me.”—I.e., outward attachment to Jesus. “Be My Disciple.” I.e., genuine attachment to His person and spirit.
Recruits Warned of Hardship.—Recruiting-sergeants commonly keep out of view what is hard, painful, and dangerous in the service for which they would enlist men; but Christ desired that none should join themselves to Him without a clear knowledge beforehand of all to which they were engaging themselves. So to St. Paul, at his conversion, is shown what great things he must suffer for Christ’s name’s sake (Acts 9:16). Ezekiel, at his first commission, is told that the men to whom he is sent are like thorns, briars, and scorpions (Ezekiel 2:6).
“Doth not hate.”—We must hate all things—our friends, our relatives, our own lives—if they draw us from Christ. We are to love our enemies; and that man is best loved who, if he tempts us from God by words of carnal wisdom, is not heard.—Wordsworth.
The Principle already Sanctioned by Scripture.—According to Deuteronomy 21:18-21, when a man showed himself utterly vicious and impious, his father and mother should be the first to take up stones to stone him. Jesus here simply spiritualises this command.—Godet.
Divinity Implied by the Claims Christ Makes.—What man, that was not man’s Maker as well as his fellow, could have required that father and mother, wife and children, should all be postponed to Himself; that, where any competition between His claims and theirs arose, He should be everything, and they nothing; that not merely these, which, though very close to a man, are yet external to him, but that his very self, his own life, should be hated, when on no other conditions Christ would be loved? God might demand this of His creatures, but how could Christ, except as He also stood in the place of God, and was God?—Trench.
Christ Demanding Hatred.—This demand must have staggered many who were now following Jesus. It was meant to sift the heterogeneous crowd. This crowding after Him was not discipleship; they could only become disciples—they could only obtain those blessings which he had to bestow—at a certain “cost.” This cost they ought to “count.” And these are His terms: “If any man come to Me, and hate not his father,” etc. Those who heard Him must have understood Him to mean that His claims were paramount, and, in case of conflict, were to override the claims of the nearest and dearest relatives. His words were well adapted to sift the crowd: the unspiritual would probably be driven away by them in disgust, while those who were attached to Jesus, in virtue of their spiritual susceptibility, would probably still cling to Him and wait for His own explanations. Of this paradox about “hating” father and mother we say
(1) that the whole spirit of Christ’s life and teaching was enough to prevent His disciples from understanding the word in its bare, bald, and literal meaning. Christ did not “trample under foot everything that is human—blood, and love, and country.” So far from commanding His disciples to hate their friends, He exhorted them to love even their enemies. He Himself respected the ties of natural relationship. He wept over Jerusalem. When on the cross He thoughtfully cared for His mother. He taught that the spirit of hatred and contempt was the very spirit of murder, and He took little children into His arms and blessed them. None could learn from Him that He demanded from His followers that they should love Him alone.
2. The word “hate” cannot here mean that we ought to love our relatives and friends with a diminished affection. This interpretation would be opposed to the teaching of Christ and the genius of Christianity. “Love one another,” says Christ, “as I have loved you.” “Husbands, love your wives,” says Paul, “even as Christ loved the Church.” What limits shall we set to affection which is thus inculcated? Pure and unselfish love cannot be excessive. We may, indeed, love the Divine Lord too little; but we cannot love any human being too much. And we shall never love the Divine Lord more by merely loving our human friends less.
3. The words “hate his own life also” are the key to the whole aphorism. A disciple is to hate his relatives and friends in the same sense in which he is to hate himself. A man can hate what is mean and base in himself; he can hate his own selfish life. Not in the bald, literal sense, for he still cares for his own true, best life, and wishes that to be developed and strengthened. But he does, in a sense, hate himself when the self in him rises in rebellion against God, and Christ, and duty. Now, in this sense also a man may hate his relatives and friends. He may hate that in them which is mean and base. He may hate that in them which seeks to drag him away from Christ. He may hate the selfishness lying in their love for him, which leads them to tempt him into sin. He may hate the selfishness lying in his own love for them, which tempts him to disobey God in order to please them, or in order to retain their friendship. Just as he hates all selfish life, so he may hate all selfish love; and this hatred he may manifest in deliberately choosing to renounce the favour and affection of his friends, rather than recant his allegiance to Christ. It is here that we are to look for the explanation of Christ’s demand for hatred; in the positive revulsion of feeling with which the faithful soul turns away from the temptations of affection, and in the positive sacrifice of friendship which may be involved in allegiance to duty. The strongest and truest love is that which is capable of the courage and self-sacrifice involved in the infliction of necessary pain. And, therefore, just as he who “hateth his life in this world” really “keeps it unto life eternal,” so he who, according to Christ’s paradox, “hates” his friends, really loves them with a deeper, more abiding, and more unselfish affection.—Finlayson.
Luke 14:27. His Cross.—I.e., his sufferings, whatever he may be called upon to suffer in My name, even as I actually bear the cross and suffer upon it. Christ here speaks prophetically of His own crucifixion—an event not likely to be foreseen by merely human wisdom, as the cross was not a Jewish form of punishment.
Luke 14:28-32. Building and Fighting.—The Christian has two kinds of work to do—building and fighting (cf. Nehemiah 4:17).
I. The positive aspect of the Christian life; the erection of a structure which arrests the attention of men, and for the building of which all the resources available will be required.
II. The negative aspect of the Christian life; a perilous war with a powerful king, which involves the possibility of being called upon to lay down one’s life for the cause.
A Bad Beginning; a Disastrous Close.
I. Christ warns His hearers, and all in later times, of the shameful close which may attend a service begun in a spirit of vain self-confidence.
II. He points out to all the only wise course for avoiding such perils as would thus be before them.
Want of Due Deliberation.
I. The folly of an inconsiderate profession of religion.
II. Its danger.
Luke 14:28. “A tower.”—Something more than an ordinary house—a considerable edifice, specially fortified, which cannot fail to arrest the attention. In like manner a Christian life professes to be something more and better than an ordinary life—to have stronger and more enduring elements in it; and the world can judge whether the profession is actually realised or not.
“Sitteth not down first.”—The sitting down first, and considering well from the very beginning all that is involved in the continuing and finishing, is to commence with deep thoughtfulness, not rashly and superficially, in contrast with that thoughtless running after Him which was witnessed at this time and which the Lord intends to humble and repel.—Stier.
“Counteth the cost.”—In the spiritual building, the only true counting of the cost is that a man should see his own absolute incompetence and emptiness. The counting of the cost must always issue in the discovery of the utter inadequacy of his own resources, and the going out of himself for strength and means to build.
Luke 14:30. “Was not able to finish.”—In the “building” which is implied in discipleship, the completion may be righteously demanded and expected of all who have begun; in this case the not continuing brings its own fitting disgrace in the sight of God and man. The world is compelled to respect the sincere and thorough-going Christian; it has nothing but contempt for the half-hearted, who give up the object which they profess to aim at—the salt that has lost its savour is trodden under their feet.
Luke 14:31-32. “Cometh … with twenty thousand.”—The king coming with twenty thousand soldiers is God, whose sanctifying power and discipline must ever be in conflict with our independent life and will until they are completely subject to His power. So far from the prince of this world being this king, man is naturally at peace with him, and Christ would not advise surrender to him.
Luke 14:31. Self-assertion a Mode of Fighting with God.—He fights with God, as truly, though in another way, as the openly ungodly, who would fain be anything in His sight, who, face to face with God, would assert himself at all; who does not renounce all that he hath, and, as that which is the dearest to him, and cleaves closest to the natural man, himself and his own righteousness the first of all. The Pharisee in the parable (Luke 18:9-12) reckoned up all that he had wherewith to meet Him who resisteth the proud and giveth grace only to the humble; the publican, on the contrary, avowed his own inability even to look his adversary in the face—and therefore, exclaiming, “God be merciful to me a sinner,” he threw down his arms, and sought, while there was yet time, “conditions of peace.”—Trench.
Luke 14:32. “Desireth conditions of peace.”—Nothing is said here of scorn or shame, since to pray for peace in the presence of the more mighty one involves no disgrace, but is rather an act of praiseworthy prudence.
Luke 14:33. The Claims of Christ’s Love.—Christ did not make things too easy for His disciples. Three times in this discourse is the tremendous sentence repeated, “He cannot be My disciple,” each time with a condition of discipleship harder and sterner than before. Hating our life, carrying our cross, forsaking all we have—why, claims like these we should have thought, would have earned either a bitter resentment or a silent disdain from most men, but for two circumstances—separately attractive, together invincible—His sincerity and His worthiness. He meant what He said, and He merited what He claimed. Those claims of His can only be met by us, and satisfied for Him, through the wondrous method of sacrifice. He claims acceptance, docility, imitation, service, trust, love.—Thorold.
“Forsaketh not.”—Nevertheless, it is not enough to forsake all that we have, unless also we forsake ourselves.—St. Gregory.
Luke 14:34. “Salt is good.”—If a man, who ought to teach others, and to preserve them from corruption, lose his savour, and become reprobate, how shall he be seasoned?—Bede.
The Need of Entire Self-sacrifice.—How significant is this admonition of the Lord, following instantly on the absolute necessity of entire self-sacrifice! “Salt is good, but if the salt have lost his savour, wherewith then shall it be seasoned?” The inference is indisputable. The salt of the Christian life is sacrifice, and if the spirit of sacrifice die out of it, and the essence of that spirit, which is love, become chilled, and its activities and devotions presently diminish, and decay, and disappear, the salt of the life is gone, and its growth paralysed, and its influence killed, and its testimony silenced. The bane of the Church of God, the dishonour of Christ, the laughing-stock of the world, is in that far too numerous body of half-alive Christians who choose their own cross, and shape their own standard, and regulate their own sacrifices, and measure their own devotions; whose sacrifices do not deprive them of a single comfort from one year’s end to another, and whose devotions never make their dull hearts burn with the love of Christ.—Thorold.